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I now solely use StarOffice, which is available for free at Sun's site ( www.sun.com ). It's perfectly suited for its job and for the average user. Best thing is that it's in no way as bloated like Office. And it runs on Linux.

So I'll probably never buy Office again. It just isn't worth it. Only if you're some professional who needs certain functions it might be worth it, but for at least 95% of all Office users, it's a useless upgrade.

Reportedly MS is taking advantage of a new UCC ruling they forced through the US governent quietly a few years back that changes their terms of service / use agreement for software. In addition to the normal "may only be used on one computer, may not be resold, etc", it says, in plain english terms, that when a newer upgrade comes out, you must either buy that upgrade or uninstall the original.

Reportedly MS is taking advantage of a new UCC ruling they forced through the US governent quietly a few years back that changes their terms of service / use agreement for software. In addition to the normal "may only be used on one computer, may not be resold, etc", it says, in plain english terms, that when a newer upgrade comes out, you must either buy that upgrade or uninstall the original.

Imagine what would happen if car makers got a similar law passed!

Can you provide a link to the source of this information?

I just read an educating article on click/shrink-wrap licenses and that point never came up.

I have researched it quite a bit, and there isn't much that would make me want to upgrade. If I was working at a company, I would probably like the upgrade, but as a home user I have no reason to upgrade. I recently bought Office 2000 Professional which will suit me well for many years. Office 97 is probably good enough for me for the next few years.

Another reason I won't be buying Office XP is that I am switching to Linux. As Elledan said, there are free alternatives that are in many cases better than the Windows version.

The difficulty with Office for corporate buyers is that the old office will no longer be available, so you are forced to buy XP or go the Star Office route - not likely in a Fortune 500 company.

We have no choice but to upgrade all our users to the new software once we can no longer buy the old software. Since we have to, by law, put XP on any Office installation for a new license, the incompatibilities with the old version force us to eventually upgrade the enterprise. Yes, it sucks. Yes, it's why Micro$oft is as profitable as they are. Planned, forced obsolescence. The alternative is to abandon Office and at this time there is no viable alternative for us.

I can't give the details of our corporate license with Micro$oft, but suffice it to say that we are screwed, and there is really nothing we can do about it.

Originally posted by thewitt The difficulty with Office for corporate buyers is that the old office will no longer be available, so you are forced to buy XP or go the Star Office route - not likely in a Fortune 500 company.

We have no choice but to upgrade all our users to the new software once we can no longer buy the old software. Since we have to, by law, put XP on any Office installation for a new license, the incompatibilities with the old version force us to eventually upgrade the enterprise. Yes, it sucks. Yes, it's why Micro$oft is as profitable as they are. Planned, forced obsolescence. The alternative is to abandon Office and at this time there is no viable alternative for us.

I can't give the details of our corporate license with Micro$oft, but suffice it to say that we are screwed, and there is really nothing we can do about it.

-t

Not sure why you would be forced to upgrade on some machines.

At any rate, you can set the default setting to save as Word 2000 or Word 97 or whatever so that you're still compatible with older versions.

Originally posted by westmich
Not sure why you would be forced to upgrade on some machines.

At any rate, you can set the default setting to save as Word 2000 or Word 97 or whatever so that you're still compatible with older versions.

No, you really can't.

We can advise, but we can't control. Once we get enough users saving files in the "wrong" version, we are forced to upgrade because the user is unwilling to save in the old format.

It sounds like a trivial thing, but with 14000 users worldwide, getting them to do anything like "save as old version" is virtually impossible. Eventually IT feels the pinch as some GM somewhere can't open a file that he needs in 15 minutes and we get the blame. Upgrading is the only way to effectively address the problem.

Micro$oft needlessly changes file formats for just this purpose. It would be trivially easy to make formats backwards compatible and just ignore features that were not in the version of software you were running. They don't play that way.

StarOffice bites IMHO, but then I used to do a lot of fairly heavy documentation work for which Office is much better (yeah, yeah, I know - Framemaker/Quark/whatever is better again...). StarOffice just didn't have the feature set or compatibility, though that's probably not an issue for 80% of users. Or if you run Linux.

I have Office 97 on my PC and what is called Office 98 on Mac (really just a Mac version of Office 97). I rarely use either and more often than not it is to read word docs that people send me (or format info into a word doc to send to someone else), or to do budgeting, financial stuff in Excel. And even to do the odd powerpoint presentation (cringe).

I have absolutely no intention of ever buying another MS Office suite. As others have pointed out there are suites for Linux that are free beer and speech. Slowly as I learn more about personal computing I am learning that the true path leads not to Redmond

Having difficulties with your keyboard are we? Why do people have to do that? Geez

Anyhow, If MicroSoft didnt make new versions and upgrade features etc - they wouldnt make money would they? It isnt (yet) as if they are forceing you to buy it - your business makes money, why shouldnt they?

And, thewitt, I sincerly doubt its as easy to backwards compatible the format, if it was they would do that - and not have a save as previous version would they?

Ive seen the beta, and as I use outlook 2000, Outlook XP does look a lot better, and a lot more secure. Ive not made my mind up on buying it yet, as O2k does just fine.

What surprised me the other day was the fact that I opened a 55k Word 2.0 file (a very old one) with lots of tables, and when I saved it I was forced to save it as a Word2k file, and it was like 200k in the end. It proposed me to install the functionality to export to Word 2.0, but this isn't available on the CD.

These are things like this that will keep me from ever buying another Office suite.

By the way, are the rumors about hardware dependencies true ? Is it necessary to get another activation key after you change your configuration ?

They aren't rumors - they are fact. I believe you must call Microsoft when you change certain hardware (most likely motherboard, but possibly other hardware). This is a step against theft of Microsoft's programs.

I was having a mess around with Word XP and 'save as html' and was quite suprised at how much cleaner the code is when compared to Word 2K (no flaming, I said when compared to Word 2K )- it's still Microsoft HTML but a hell of a lot better. If I get a chance in the next couple of days I will upload a page for you to have a peek at.

With regards to the activation, if you change 3 items of hardware that were used to produce the activation key then you will have to get another one. This also applies if you re-format your hard drive.

As far as OfficeXP goes I don't really have a problem with the activation key system, office is a big program with a lot of development behind it that is likley to be big a target for theft and licence misuse. The EULA covers installation of a single copy on my machine at work and my laptop - in short I am happy.

However, it looks like MS are going to apply the same technology to Win XP (it is already in RC1) this ticks me off more than a little. I, and I would hazard a guess, a large proportion of the people who frequent these forums, mess around with hardware configurations on almost a weekly basis. Incorporating this level of copy protection is going to be a real pain in the a$$. MS give away there OS's like sweets, in fact it's hard to buy a PC without an MS OS pre-installed, why bother with copy protection? And the real killer (no hard facts here, just hearsay) word is you can only reactivate 10 times!

I don't have ANY Microsoft software on my computer with ONE exception - Internet Explorer (Netscape 6 for mac has too many bugs right now). I have a text editing software that will read and write most word files... and don't use anything else enough to buy a $700 software package. Office 2001 for Mac looked really interesting, but free is just so much better. Plus, I'm not one for supporting the big monopolies anyway. I like using and supporting shareware and open source software.

Of course my machine at work (a PC) has Office and several other programs by Micro$oft. I've been trying to convince them to get me a Mac, but until then I guess I'm stuck with Bill.